Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As the use of mobile services grows, network capacity will become increasingly constrained, especially during peak times. Some mobile subscribers will likely be willing to pay more for enhanced service quality, while other subscribers might be willing to accept some service degradation for lower prices. Differentiated Quality of Service (QoS) methods could help service providers, such as mobile operators, better match service levels with their customers' expectations.
The DiffSery architecture (as described in RFC 2474; RFC 2475; RFC 2597; RFC 3140; RFC 3246; RFC 3260; and RFC 4594) allows for IP packet prioritization, so that delivery of IP packets originating from high-priority end points may be prioritized over those from lower-priority end points. The DiffServ architecture provides a class-based mechanism for traffic management which has relatively low network overhead; however DiffServ does not give high-priority end points the full benefit of their priority when communicating with low-priority end points. This is because while high priority IP packets may be prioritized for rapid & high quality delivery from the high-priority end point to the low-priority end point, low priority IP packets may be delivered more slowly and with higher error in the reverse direction, resulting in overall poor QoS for the high-priority end point in some situations.
In contrast to Diffserv, Integrated Services (IntServ), as described in RFC 1633, provides a flow-based mechanism for traffic management, which strives to guarantee QoS for designated data flows, e.g., communications back and forth between two end points. However, IntServ is expensive to deploy within a communications network in terms of network overhead.